As it was briefly mentioned in the topic about the new discourse category structure, I also did some remodeling of the groups – a feature a little hidden to the normal user of discourse.

I want to take this opportunity to highlight a few important things about groups:

We do have a special OpenTechSchool group for all OpenTechSchool Organisers now. Everyone, who signs up with an opentechschool.org email address is automatically added to it. If you are NOT yet added to it, please inform the admins.

Admins is a group of people with special rights to add others to groups. If you want to be in a group, you currently do not belong to, please write one (or many) of us.

There are some “Team”-Groups – people, who belong to specific teams – for example TeamBerlin. This is very handy if you want to mention or write your entire team. See below how that is done. If you want another of these teams – write the admins!

Working with Team aliases

You’ve probably already noticed that when you type the @ here, you get an auto complete for user names. This also works for groups:

Upon selection, these are expanded into all the people currently part of that group – which makes for an easy way of mentioning the entire team. Aside from @admins, teams can only be used as an alias by its team members. So make sure to be part of the teams you want to mention. But in general be scarce with that usage!

This feature also works for private messages. Just open a new private message, type “admin” in the to field and click on the auto complete – it will expand to send the message to all admins.